oetry, to succeed also in the
serious drama, written in poetry. It is a legitimate ambition; but poets
should be acquainted with their limitations, and not waste their
energies or our patience on work which they cannot do well. That men
like Tennyson and Browning, who were profoundly capable of understanding
what a great drama means, and is; who had read what the
master-tragedians of Greece have done; who knew their Shakespeare, to
say nothing of the other Elizabethan dramatists; who had seen Moliere on
the stage; who must have felt how the thing ought to be done, composed,
and versed; that they, having written a play like _Harold_ or
_Strafford_, should really wish to stage it, or having heard and seen it
on the stage should go on writing more dramas, would seem
incomprehensible, were it not that power to do one thing very well is so
curiously liable to self-deceit.

The writing of the first drama is not to be blamed. It would be
unnatural not to try one's hand. It is the writing of the others which
is amazing in men like Tennyson and Browning. They ought to have felt,
being wiser than other men in poetry, that they had no true dramatic
capacity. Other poets who also tried the drama did know themselves
better. Byron wrote several dramas, but he made little effort to have
them represented on the stage. He felt they were not fit for that; and,
moreover, such scenic poems as _Manfred_ and _Cain_ were not intended
for the stage, and do not claim to be dramas in that sense. To write
things of this kind, making no claim to public representation, with the
purpose of painting a situation of the soul, is a legitimate part of a
poet's work, and among them, in Browning's work, might be classed _In a
Balcony_, which I suppose his most devoted worshipper would scarcely
call a drama.

Walter Scott, than whom none could conduct a conversation better in a
novel, or make more living the clash of various minds in a critical
event, whether in a cottage or a palace; whom one would select as most
likely to write a drama well--had self-knowledge enough to understand,
after his early attempts, that true dramatic work was beyond his power.
Wordsworth also made one effort, and then said good-bye to drama.
Coleridge tried, and staged _Remorse_. It failed and deserved to fail.
To read it is to know that the writer had no sense of an audience in his
mind as he wrote it--a fatal want in a dramatist. Even its purple
patches of fine poetry and its